Download PDF | Land And Privilege In Byzantium The Institution Of Pronoia
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A pronoia was a type of conditional grant from the emperor, often to soldiers, of various properties and privileges. In large measure the institution of pronoia characterized social and economic relations in later Byzantium, and its study is the study of later Byzantium. Filling the need for a comprehensive study of the institution, this book examines the origin, evolution, and characteristics of pronoia, focusing particularly on the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But the book is much more than a study of a single institution. With a broad chronological scope extending from the mid-tenth to the midfifteenth century, it incorporates the latest understanding of Byzantine agrarian relations, taxation, administration, and the economy, as it deals with relations between the emperor, monastic and lay landholders, including soldiers and peasants. Particular attention is paid to the relation between the pronoia and western European, Slavic, and Middle Eastern institutions, especially the Ottoman timar.
MARK C. BARTUSIS is Professor of History at Northern State University. He is an expert in later Byzantine political, social, and military history and author of The Late Byzantine Army: Arms and Society, 1204-1453.
Acknowledgments
With numerous interruptions, the research and writing of this book were conducted over a twenty-year period during which time I was the recipient of material support from several institutions and organizations. An Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, a Dumbarton Oaks Summer Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars afforded me access to library materials and respite from my teaching responsibilities. A Faculty Development Grant, a Nora Staael Evert Summer Research Grant, and a Faculty Travel Grant, all from Northern State University, along with sabbatical leave, were appreciated. As always, the librarians of Northern State University were most helpful in facilitating my work. And finally, to the friends and colleagues and family who offered advice or a sympathetic ear, thanks much, really.
A note on transliteration, pronunciation, and dates
Byzantine Greek is a challenge to transliterate. In the interest of standardization, I have transliterated most Greek (as well as Slavic and Turkish) technical terms and names of people and places according to the form in which they appear in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (1991), the editors of which have adopted a system for Greek that uses a modified letter-forletter approach (“a” for alpha, “b” for beta) but employs common English forms wherever they are well established (“Constantine” rather than “Konstantinos”). I depart from the ODB when I transliterate the letter beta. In the period this book deals with (the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries), beta was generally pronounced like a “v.” Thus, throughout the book, I have opted for the transliteration that better represents the sound of medieval Greek. And so, “Glavas” rather than the ODB’s “Glabas,” and “Vryennios” rather than “Bryennios,” and in technical terms “sevastos” rather than “sebastos.” There are a handful of exceptions, such as “Bosporos,” “Bulgaria,” “Botaneiates,” and of course “Byzantium.”
Even though Byzantine Greek sounded much like modern Greek, scholars sometimes pronounce it as if it were ancient Greek or some mixture of ancient and modern. The ODB system of transliteration, while it has the virtue of simplicity and is rather faithful to the spelling of Greek, is quite misleading in regard to pronunciation (for which it offers no assistance). Consequently, and with no claim to be doing justice to the complexities of the medieval Greek language, I provide a few general rules here to help the reader approximate the later Byzantine pronunciations of the strange names and terms that appear in this book.
Introduction
This is a book about the Byzantine institution of pronoia: what it was, how it originated, how it changed over time, and the effect it had on society. A pronoia was a type of grant, conferred by the Byzantine emperor from the twelfth century through the end of the empire in the fifteenth century. The term itself — pronoia (1tpdvoia, pronounced PRO-nee-ah) — is a relatively common Greek word that usually means “care,” “providence,” “foresight.” However, in certain contexts it denotes something much more specific. A few examples from the documentary sources illustrate this use of the word pronoia:
e In 1234 a group of monks complained to the emperor about being forced to pay taxes ona fish pond to a certain Constantine Kalegopoulos because “all the fish ponds there pay taxes to Kalegopoulos, since he holds in pronoia the rights of the river” [5.7].
e A document from 1251, notes that, in order to resolve a property dispute, a soldier had convened an assembly of “all the head men of his pronoia” 9.9]. e An early fourteenth-century book of mathematical problems includes one about four soldiers who had “an imperial pronoia of 600” gold coins [8.8].
e In a document from 1314 two men donate some fields they held “pronoiastically” to a monastery. They state that the donation was to be valid “as long as our pronoia is held by us” /8.55].! e An act from 1228 describes the killing of a peasant by a man whom he had insulted. The man said he was astonished “that a peasant spoke with such impudence, shooting forth bold words toward me his pronoiarios” [5.16].
The narrative sources also use pronoia in this sense: e In the later thirteenth century the historian Theodore Skoutariotes, addressing the policies of the emperors around the middle of the century, wrote, “And from this all of the taxpayers became wealthy, and those of the military lists and the magnates had many times larger revenues from the pronoiai and properties and many times the incomes supplied to them for sustenance” [5.13].
In the early fourteenth century the historian George Pachymeres writes that, after coming to the throne, Emperor Michael VII Palaiologos (125982) allowed soldiers to transmit their pronoiai to their children, even if they were as yet unborn: “Loving the soldiery exceedingly, he established the pronoiai of these, should they fall in battle and die, as patrimonial property to the children, even if, for some, the mothers should have the fetus in the womb” [6.10].
In another passage Pachymeres explains that Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos, in order to finance a military campaign in 1283, had levied a special 10 percent tax: “This was the tenth of the pronoia of those having pronoiai. While it was collected ostensibly from the rights of the lords, the peasants of the powerful paid everything” [8.34].
In a letter to the emperor Patriarch Athanasios I (1289-93, 1303-09) complained about bishops who had abandoned their sees for life in Con- stantinople: “pronoiai and residences have been granted to any bishop who wishes as an allotment, and they make merry in the capital with impunity, and seek their livelihood here” [7.1].
Collating the information provided by this handful of diverse sources, we may infer, at least on the face of things, that a pronoia was a kind of grant from the emperor to soldiers, “lords,” the “powerful,” and bishops. The holder of a pronoia could be called a “pronoiarios” (pro-nee-AH-ree-os). Pronoia grants seem to have produced revenues that could be quantified by a cash amount and that were derived from land, the rights to a river, and the labors of peasants who were attached to the pronoiai. Further, pronoiai evidently could be taxed, shared by individuals, donated to a monastery, and inherited.
It is from sources like these that scholars have sought to define the institution associated with this word pronoia. It has not been easy. Few source references are any more explicit than these, and most are far less specific. Almost all assume that the intended reader knew exactly what a “pronoia” was.
The historiography of pronoia
Serious interest in the study of pronoia began, not with the study of such Byzantine sources, but with the examination of the appearance of the word in Serbian, Bosnian, and Venetian sources. In 1860 the Russian scholar A. A. Majkov published an article entitled “On Landed Property in Medieval Serbia.” There he examined the clauses dealing with property found in the Law Code (Zakonik) of the Serbian ruler Stefan Dusan (1331-55). Toward the end of the article Majkov wrote, “In concluding this investigation of various forms of landed property in Serbia, I direct attention to an aspect of landed property designated in the Zakonik by the foreign name pronija,” the Slavic transliteration of pronoia. What he viewed as the precarious nature of the possession of pronija led him to differentiate it from patrimonial property (called bastina). He hypothesized that it indicated a form of “incomplete possession, possibly contingent on a state obligation,” and he pondered, “Was it not imperial land, placed in the power of lords and cultivated by them?””
Eight years later he published another article, “What is Pronijain Medieval Serbia?” Basing his research on a single document, an act from 1458 of the king of Bosnia Stefan Tomasevi¢, he concluded that pronija was a temporary possession, analogous to the Muscovite institutions of kormlenie and pomestie, and that it “represents subsistence land [kormeZnuju zemlju], an estate [pomestie] allotted by the decision of a sovereign power to someone personally, given without right of perpetual use, so that the sovereign could either take it back and give it to another or effect an exchange.”*
Majkov’s research was born amid the Balkan and agrarian questions, as well as the Slavophilism, of nineteenth-century Russia. The Crimean War had ended in 1856 and Russia’s serfs were formally emancipated five years later. Another product of Slavic nationalism was the edition of Dusan’s Zakonik that Majkov had used. It had been edited by the Pole Andrzej Kucharski, and translated into German by the Slovak Paul Safatik and published in 1838. While Safatik translated the Zakonik’s pronijar as simply “Grundherr” and its pronijarska zemlja as “grundherrliches Land,” he ventured an etymology for pronija that Majkov echoed. Safatik suggested that the word was Germanic in origin, equivalent to the modern Frone “compulsory service,” from the Old High German fré “lord,” which derived ultimately from the Gothic frao and fraujana.
Nevertheless, the origin of the Slavic word pronija is not Germanic, but Greek, a fact first recognized by the Serb Djura Danici¢ in his dictionary of old Serbian published in 1863. Independently of Majkov, but still on the evidence of Dusan’s Zakonik, Danici¢ defined pronija as “fundus ad usumfructum datus” (“estate given in usufruct”).°
After Majkov, work on Serbian pronoia was continued by Vikentij MakuSev in “On Pronija in Medieval Serbia,” published in 1874. While MakuSev recognized the Byzantine origin of the term, he, like Majkov, focused on the appearance of the term in fifteenth-century Venetian and Dalmatian acts, concluding that pronoia in these documents was a form of precarious and conditional possession which the Venetian government granted on a broad scale to aristocrats, in compliance with Albanian customs (“secundum consuetudinem Albaniae’), for life and on condition of paying a certain sum and bearing mounted military service. Pronoia was inalienable and could be confiscated for the good of the treasury.°
In articles published in 1878 and 1879 V. G. Vasil’evskij turned the attention of Russian scholars to the Byzantine sources for the study of this phenomenon called “pronoia.” He provided references to “where one meets Greek pronoia, corresponding to the Serbian,” and pointed out that “pronoia must be studied on the basis of Byzantine sources, because here we encounter its earliest mention.”’
But indeed the Byzantine use of the word pronoia had not gone unnoticed by earlier scholars. Prior to Danici¢, philologists of Byzantine Greek had occasionally noted strange usages of the word pronoia. In the commentary to his 1845 edition of the fifteenth-century Chronicle of Ioannina [7.4] the Greek Andreas Moustoxydes wrote that pronoiai meant “the yearly collections of incomes which the founders leave to the church.”* And even as early as the late seventeenth century the French scholar Charles Du Cange, in his dictionary of medieval Greek, had translated pronoia as “provisiones, pensiones annuae” (“provisions, yearly payments”).?
The turning point came with the publication in 1883 of Fedor I. Uspenskij’s article, “The Significance of Byzantine and South Slav Pronoia.” Uspenskij definitively established the Byzantine origin of pronoia, and set the tone of future research by defining pronoia as “a grant to state servants of land and other income producing property in reward for service and on condition of future service”... “especially,” he added, “as a reward for military service and on condition to continue to undertake military service.” 1°
The understanding of pronoia was becoming more sophisticated, but the veil of historicism lay heavy on Russian scholarship. The following year, 1884, Nikolaj Skabalanovic in a book entitled The Byzantine State and Church in the Eleventh Century wrote the following:
The system of pronoia represented the greatest danger for the liberty and prosperity of the peasantry. The granting in pronoia of community lands directly menaced the rural community... . the political significance of the community to the state was weakened, free peasants fell into dependence to pronoiars to whom they had to pay taxes and furnish corvées; from every point of view... their situation doubtlessly worsened ... pronoia was dangerous for the peasant community and for the peasants because it increased the social power of the nobles."
Russian scholars continued work along these lines up until the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917. After that serious scholarship was stifled, and the pre-revolution generation passed away. Four of the more prominent Russian Byzantinists in the early years of the twentieth century, Konstantin Uspenskij, Boris Pancenko, Petr Jakovenko, and Pavel Bezobrazov, died between 1917 and 1920, at the ages of 43, 48, 50, and 59.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, scholarship, like many things, suffered in the Soviet Union. What little scholarship there was became derivative and doctrinaire. And the center of gravity of the study of pronoia, as well as of Byzantine studies as a whole, moved westward.
In 1923 Peter Mutaftiev published a monograph, in Bulgarian, on the Byzantine army in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This contained a long chapter on pronoia with an extensive analysis of the sources.!* Despite the often seriously flawed aspects of Mutafciev’s work, a new chapter in the study of pronoia was opened, for the book came into the hands of the great German Byzantinist Franz Délger, who was able to read Bulgarian. During the 1930s, as Délger edited texts and wrote commentaries, the subject of pronoia became known to western European and American scholars.!° This was fortified by the work of Russian expatriates — Alexander Vasiliev in the United States, and Alexander Solovjev and George Ostrogorsky in Yugoslavia — who kept alive the tradition of Russian Byzantine scholarship and exported it westward."
After World War I], a new generation of western Byzantinists, such as Peter Charanis in the United States, emerged who began to take up the issue of Byzantine agrarian relations and pronoia. At the same time a slightly more relaxed climate in the Soviet Union produced a new and better caliber of Byzantine scholar, of whom the sterling example was Alexander Kazhdan, who raised an unending string of questions about all matters Byzantine.!°
But this was all prelude to what was to come. In 1951 the Russian George Ostrogorsky, director of the newly established Byzantine Institute in Belgrade, published, in Serbian, a monograph entitled Pronoia: A Contribution to the History of Feudalism in Byzantium and in the South Slavic Lands.'° Ostrogorsky was a brilliant, first-rate scholar. But while conditions in eastern Europe after World War II were far less hostile to independent scholarship than those in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik coup, he nevertheless had to be comfortable with arriving at conclusions in accord with Marxist doctrine. Thus, he argued that the function of the institution of pronoia, which first appeared in the middle of the eleventh century, was to raise a feudal army and its effect was to create a feudal aristocracy that exploited a subject, dependent peasantry. A pronoia was, more or less, a fief, and the existence of pronoia therefore was further proof of the ubiquity of the feudal mode of production during the Middle Ages.
Had Ostrogorsky’s book remained in a Serbian edition it would have had no more influence than Peter Mutafciev’s Bulgarian monograph on the Byzantine army thirty years earlier. But in 1954 the work was translated into French by Henri Grégoire and published in Brussels, together with a translation of another of Ostrogorsky’s works, as Pour V’histoire de la féodalité byzantine.’ Western scholars and students now had, more or less, direct access to a century of Slavic research on Byzantine agrarian relations. Even today George Ostrogorsky is the first scholar that Byzantinists think of when the subject is pronoia. His emphasis on the military role of pronoia has left a profound imprint on all later research.
And much research there was. From the late 1950s on, agrarian relations became a popular topic among western European and American Byzantinists as researchers became more interested in social and economic questions. The same social conditions that gave rise and prominence in the 1960s to the Annales school and to the New Social History made the institution of pronoia a staple topic in modern Byzantine historical studies.
Numerous works have been written which deal with agrarian relations in Byzantium which, even if their focus was not the institution of pronoia per se, have illuminated the social and economic context in which pronoia operated. Particular mention should be made of the work of Paul Lemerle, Héléne Ahrweiler, Nicolas Oikonomides, Jacques Lefort, Ksenia Hvostova, Angeliki Laiou, and David Jacoby. This is not the place to discuss the historiography on pronoia since the 1950s. There are good treatments of this elsewhere, and I will be evaluating this scholarship in detail in the course of this study.'
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